A first-person account by Vishen Lakhiani describing how, during a cash-crunch in 2008, attending T. Harv Eker’s Millionaire Mind Intensive helped him and his co-founder change limiting beliefs about money. After shifting their ‘wealth mindset’ and shedding limiting stories, Mindvalley’s revenues grew ~400% by December 2008; by 2009 debts were paid and the company expanded. The talk emphasizes inner belief work as the core driver behind subsequent business tactics and growth.
Chapters
So in 2008, I was an entrepreneur and my company, Mindvalley, was about five years old. Me and my business partner, well, we had put so much of our savings into the company and we were hoping to build something really great to be wealthy. But it wasn't quite going as planned. It was May 2008 and what I remember was we were making maybe a quarter million dollars in revenue a month. We had just over 20 employees, but we were losing $15,000 a month. And what was going on is that our bank balance was just getting lower and lower and lower. My business partner at that time still had his Stanford college debt to pay. I had to pay for housing and a whole bunch of other things that were building up on me. And it was really hard knowing that our business was about to collapse and worse, knowing that we were about to lay off and employees unless nothing changed. What was sad is that five years into building a company, I knew that if I lost this business, I would be worse off than if I'd never started. Now that was kind of the time when we saw an ad in the papers for the seminar happening by this dude called T. Harve Eker. We went for the seminar really skeptical. And the seminar was called the Millionaire Mind Intensive. It was based on Harbecker's best selling book, Secrets of the Millionaire Mind. So I was there with Mike, my business partner. And you know, in day one, we were really skeptical. I remember just before lunch on day one, Mike is like, dude, this is ridiculous. Let's just get the heck out of here. I don't feel we are learning much, but we had a gut feeling to stay. And I'm glad we did because by day three, literally, I remember turning around to Mike and there were tears streaming down his eyes because that seminar had touched us so deeply. What we realized, the big lesson I got is that wealth and being successful abundance wise has more to do with your mindset and your attitude towards money than any other single thing. We were crazy smart. I had an engineering degree, he was a Stanford mba. But both of us had major issues around money. And these issues suppressed us. They held our business back from growing. It's as if every time we were on the verge of growing that business, these like, these bullshit issues from our past, from observations we had around our culture, our friends, feelings such as the rich people are douchey or if you become too rich, you lose your friends or you have to work really, really, really hard to actually make money. All of these ideas actually became models of reality that held us back. And what we learned through Harv Eker was that a lot of these are just stories we tell ourselves. And as we started shedding these stories, one by one, amazing things happened. By December 2008, we'd grown our business, revenue wise, 400%. MindValley became the MindValley we know today. By 2009, we had built an epic office space. We had paid off all our debts. The company had grown 400% in just under one year. That was huge. And our lives were never the same again. Today, mindvalley continues on a massive positive upswing. And people ask me, what was the secret? Was it business classes you took? Did you learn new strategies or marketing models? Was it great developers or talent that you hired? Yes, it was all of that. But the main thing, all of that happened because of one underlying root cause. And that root cause was we shed these bullshit stories that we were telling ourselves about money. We changed our wealth mindset, and that sparked everything else. And until you go straight to the mindset and you identify the stories that you're telling yourself about wealth and abundance and being wealthy, and you remove the bullshit and the drama that you believe, you're never really going to attain your full potential in that field. That's what I learned from Harv Eker. And even though I run a personal growth company and I've studied hundreds of authors, Harv is perhaps the one I've spent the most time studying in my life. So remember, we spent 70% of our waking hours just trying to earn a living. But so many of us stagnate and stay at a specific level because we, we never bother to go deep within our minds and identify the belief systems that we have about success and abundance and riches and to remove the beliefs which are holding us back and swap in beliefs that empower us. When you do this, this is when you really, really, really grow in your career as an entrepreneur and in your levels of wealth and ab.
